Fresh in from the city with those kids in the Haight, where they’re doing it right.

In the city they do things differently. There are people on the streets — real ones — who know how to take a bus to a train across town; who don’t need directions, just an innate sense of it; who can parallel park a bronco between saplings. There are people who hear the nuclear traffic but listen to the music instead. People who incite reaction for the sake of continual abnormality in their lives others because the alternative just ain’t fun. People who tell a hoard of hippie bikers that their Bronco’s run on baby seal oil just to get them to fucking move.

I’m not make this up.

Such things certainly happen on this side of the bay, but they are far from the normal or the expected. ‘Round here we do whatever it is that we had planned on doing, except when we don’t even do that. And under no circumstance whatsoever do we do whatever it is that comes to mind at that instant. That would be unexpected, imprudent, immature.

And what would the neighbors think?

Not that someone comes by door-to-door when you move in and tells you explicitly to be a boring noob; you just kind of grow into the surrounding if you’re complacent enough and have no convictions of your own. And most people don’t.

Well, guess the fuck what?

It’s time we start. It’s time we consider the possibilities looming on the horizon because we know they will drop below it like a sinking ship if enough time goes by. Travel destinations abound and it’s possible, readers, it’s possible to see them not as travel destinations, but potential new homes. We could always start with Europe.

If for no reason other than we don’t want to have to be writing about my phone conversation with PG&E the other day when I had to get electrical and gas service connected to my apartment.

Pedro Ávila

For a reasonably sane & productive member of society (arguable, but let’s not complicate things), I’m far too mobile and unrooted. I travel quite a bit for a job that is simultaneously my greatest privilege and my worst burden.

So I write. And I write. Travel pieces, political journalism (a stretch from ranting but, still), short stories, poetry and other such riff-raff. I contribute to a handful of publications and will probably just keep going until something gives out, or someone gives in.